1. Everybody’s doing the locomotion . . . really. We are all engines, which by their most basic definition are machines that convert energy into motion.
2. And while you could think of animals as being engines, plants have them: Photosynthesis pathways are often described as plant engines, and biologists are particularly interested in the C4 plant engine, which was discovered in the 1960s.
3. Plants powered by C4 engines, including maize and sugar cane, typically convert atmospheric carbon dioxide more readily, thanks to novel leaf and cell structures. They also tend to produce higher yields than C3 species, which outnumber C4 species by about 30 to 1.
